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Howard Aggregate’s Late Preview #1

Fans of BBC2’s long-running snooker programme Pot Black will be thrilled to learn that later tonight there’s the first edition of the Brent Cross Billiards Hall and Debating Society’s radio equivalent, Pot Kettle Black. The programme describes itself as ‘the noise of water boiling on baize for thirty minutes’ and is presented by a group of experienced hypocrites led by Estonian hustler Primus Stove.

If you’re going out on Thursday evening, don’t. Instead, lose yourself in Drunken Monologues. This, the only programme of its kind on the airwaves, features a different sozzled bore every week as he/she staggers out of a Borough pub at closing time and verbally assails heaps of rubbish outside repossessed offices. On its website, dontistillworkhere.com, Drunken Monologues describes itself as giving the listener ‘the sensation of being a homeless person huddled under a dead rubber plant and an empty toner cartridge box, subjected to self-pitying diatribes and random bouts of cursing for sixty minutes, usually followed by a wee.’

Users of the hugely popular communications toy Twitter should check out Friday’s one-off mid-afternoon special, Knitter, fifteen minutes of intense needle clacking in which a secret message is spelt out in binary code. Can YOU crack it? The winner receives a his or hers tank top, perfect for these chilly winter nights spent indoors listening to the radio. Join the programme’s Facebook group by typing ‘Knitter’ into the site’s search engine and clicking on the photograph of the excited-looking cat on page 5.

Coming straight after Knitter is the Psychogeographer’s Cookery Hour, in which presenter and junk-food junkie Will Ballard (not his real name) orders home-delivered meals from all corners of N8, rating them not in terms of flavour, appearance or nutrition but to what extent the dishes ‘fulfil their psychogeographic destiny as touchstones of the pan-urban flux.’ In the last twenty minutes of the programme you can follow Will as he goes on what the programme listing describes as a ‘picaresque, post-cash derive along Hornsey High Street in search of soy sauce, Tabasco and liver salts’.

Finally, the week on Resonance culminates in Sunday evening’s new religio-mystical-sort-of-sci-fi-y Songs of Greys, in which the Rev. Daniela Dilithium plays hymns sung by extraterrestials from all corners of the galaxy. There’ll be plenty of old favourites to enjoy, such as Abide with ET, For Those in Peril on the Milky Way, and, of course, There is A Green Man Not So Far Away. Daniela is currently in an editing suite on the far side of Alpha Centauri so this is a pre-record. You can, however, still contact the programme by wandering about the lonely byways of West Virginia in your jim-jams anytime after 11 o’clock at night.